A House, A Car, and A Chicken

This narrative begins outside of Bukovina, Romania, and ends, where my husband, my children and I are blessed to live, that is, in Jerusalem. You see, a few days ago, I got up from sitting shiva for my mom.

My mother was a first generation American. She led an extremely difficult life. Both of her parents immigrated, to the States, from Eastern Europe, but not at the same time. Their immigration journeys to the USA were similar only in that each of my maternal grandparents initially sheltered with distant relatives whom they had never previously met and in that they were the only people in their respective families not to perish in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were poor. My grandmother sewed buttons onto clothing in a Garment District sweatshop. My grandfather was a waiter. When my immediate ancestors accepted American Thanksgiving into their lives, the four of them (my mother had just one brother) celebrated with a single turkey leg.

My grandfather was niftar when my mother was sixteen. Since her lone sibling was eight years older and already married, she and her widowed mother lived alone in poverty.

Somehow, my mother was able to enter college. I don’t know how she managed the financial arrangements. Furthermore, in the 1950s, higher education was not a path that women took for granted. My mother had “dreamed big.”

While in college, she met my father, who was attending a nearby school. There was a spark between them that enabled that zug to do more than line up corresponding middot.

They married. Mom left college. Eventually, they had me, the older of their two daughters.

Dad was Mom’s prince. He had a promising future. Although he, too, had grown up with very few material resources, Hashem had gifted him with intellectual powers. Decades ago, there had even been a New York City newspaper clipping (I don’t recall which paper) circulating among my extended family referencing my father’s atypical Regents, college admission test, and undergraduate scores. I believe that my father’s tuition and other costs were fully paid by the universities that he attended, for all of his degrees.

Regardless, he was about to enter a doctoral program at Cornell University, in nuclear engineering, around the time when my parents planned to get married. Upon graduating, my father’s success enabled my parents to have a house, a car, and chicken to eat. Through my father, my mother attained “The American Dream.”

However, her dream morphed into a nightmare. Whereas my father excelled in his work (doing things like designing shielding for the USA navy’s submarines’ nuclear reactors), was well received by his peers (as a small child, I thought it was normal for one’s father to travel at least twice a year to national conferences to present research findings-I took for granted my family’s ensuing “summer vacations”), and articulate about his ideas (note to self: when, in the 1960s, upon visiting your dad’s lab, you ought NOT to erase the “scribbles,” i.e. equations, on his blackboard so that you can draw flowers), he was stricken with Multiple Sclerosis. Namely, my mother had her house, her car, and her chicken, but for her entire married life, she had an increasingly ailing beloved.

As preteens and teens, my sister and I lived at hospitals and rehab centers. During that span, when home, first, my father could drive with hand controls, and later, my mother learned how to drive. All of us helped my father from wheelchair to car and vice versa. The last fifteen years of his life, though, he was a quadriplegic, who was bedridden and, who, eventually, had to rely on a machine to breathe for him. Accordingly, for decades, my mother lived with my father’s suffering and with her crushed dreams.

When they were both sixty-five, my father succumbed to the complications of his illness. My mother, who died, weeks short of her ninetieth birthday, never felt any interest in remarrying. She missed my father so much!

For a long time, she remained in the house that she and my father had bought in the1960s. It was only three years ago, when visiting my USA-based sister for Pesach, that she moved to an assisted living community near my sister. The house that my parents had bought was never sold (in the interim, my sister hired people to mow, to shovel, to check that its pipes didn’t freeze, etc.)

Over time, my mother made friends within her new community. Nonetheless, understandably, she missed her home and the decades of connections that she had established there. Sadly, she never regained enough health to return.

During the last two months of her life, she went from hospital to rehab to hospital to rehab to hospital to hospice. Her care providers gave her mere days in hospice. Sure enough, within that time frame, I received the call that she had mere hours left to live. Soon after, I received the call that she had passed.

There were many more ways in which she had suffered throughout her life, but they’re not shareable. Sima bat Yaakov. Daughter of Hashem. May her soul have an aliyah.